It’s very seldom that whole drawing session goes well, but I’m happy to say that this life drawing session went well, even for my gestures.
My warmup page, I’m getting to a point where I really enjoy this. It’s kinda like a calming down/setup phase before my drawing session, it really sets the stage for the next three hours of drawing.
I’m actually happy with a lot of these gestures, these are not perfect by any means but at least I was able to get the motion and some good lines throughout.
The 5 minute poses went very well, I was able to get almost the entire figure done for all the poses and the proportions are pretty darn close. The essence for good figure drawing is getting the lines in the “right” place on the first try without much measuring. Masters of figure drawing get it perfect on the first go without any measuring and with these drawing I feel that I’m a step closer to that.
Whenever I introduce value/shading into a figure drawing I always have to sacrifice some time which means not doing the full figure or not much detail. In most cases I think it’s a good trade.
I worked hard on this portrait for 15 minutes, I was very happy that I achieved a very close likeness to the model. Portraits are another thing that takes up a lot of time. If I ever have a drawing that involves a portrait I always can’t finish the rest of the figure.
This one was weird, when the time was called I looked up and was thinking that they mis counted the time, that couldn’t have been 30 minutes. I guess I was in the zone, and time became a bit irrelevant. I wish I could be in that zone for every piece of art I do.
For this pose I focused mostly on value and shading. I really liked how the light played over her back describing the subtle transition in the form. Plus I went for reality, if I see it I should draw it. On too many occasions artists ignore things like tattoos and I think most of the time it’s because they are hard to draw, not because they made a compositional choice.
After focusing mostly on value and shading I decided to do nothing but line for this pose. Standing frontal poses are usually the hardest to get proportions correct so I made sure to do some measuring. I’m happy to say with minimal measurement I was able to finish this drawing with almost dead on proportion. I think the feet are a bit small, but it’s no big deal.
All in all it was a very good day at the open studio, I hope for more days like this in the future.
